


Where There's A Will

by AnonymousVow



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, BAMF Molly Hooper, F/M, Mycroft is a good brother, Overprotective Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock is Will, Sherlock is a Doctor, Swaplock, Well it is an AU, onesided Adlock, sherlock is sweet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25059925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousVow/pseuds/AnonymousVow
Summary: Swaplock!AUDr. William Holmes is in love with Consulting Detective Molly Hooper. No one, including Will, thinks this will amount to anything. Then Irene Adler arrives to shake things up.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper, sherlolly
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	Where There's A Will

**Author's Note:**

> An idea that has been itching at me for the past week.

_Sherlock: I used to think I was an idiot._

_Mycroft: Both of us thought you were an idiot, Sherlock. We had nothing else to go on, until we met other children._

_Sherlock: Oh yes, that was a mistake._

_Mycroft: Ghastly. What were they thinking of?_

* * *

William Holmes was used to being second-best.

Actually, he literally did not know how it felt to live without that being the primary facet of his identity. Even before his tiny baby brain achieved something like true sentience he must have understood how much better his older brother was. There had been no moment of realization, no dawning comprehension - from his earliest, half-formed memories he’d known Mycroft was different. It was like knowing how to breathe.

As a result he lived his life in a vaguely apologetic way, sorry for not being on Mycroft’s level and hoping that if he was at least pleasant and helpful, it would somewhat mitigate everyone’s disappointment. Mycroft had never been anything like a problem child, intelligent, self-controlled (except when it came to cakes) and already knowing the value of a good reputation, but between the two of them William was definitely the easy child - so easy a child, in fact, that his parents often marvelled aloud, although careful never to do so in earshot of either of their sons.

As a full-grown adult, he of course understood that he was not an idiot - that he was, in fact, reckoned among the top five percent nationally (at least). He knew, through various third-party and external tests, that he was highly accomplished himself - he had graduated first in his class, had earned prestigious scholarships, had won various awards, had been published, and he knew he had done it easily - so easily it barely felt like accomplishments, sometimes. And yet.

And _yet_...

In short, the fact that he was deeply in love with Molly Hooper, Consulting Detective, and the fact that he had not got a snowball’s chance in hell with her seemed just about right for him and his life.

After all, why would she want him? Will knew that next to handsome Detective Inspector Lestrade, or next to his own dapper older brother, both of whom were able to give Molly what she so wanted - cases - he was pretty much the also-ran.

And next to her flatmate, Captain John H. Watson - soldier, Army surgeon, superlative shot, and Molly’s partner in all things - _well_.

So he sighed and resigned himself to his new life of quietly pining from - well, quite near actually, since Molly and John were forever dropping by St. Bart’s for their cases - and filed every smile Molly ever gave him in his Mind Palace.

* * *

_Ping!_

Anthea glanced over at her superior’s desk automatically at the sound of the mobile alert tone, her gaze lingering at the slight half-smile curving his mouth.

Ah, it was from Will, then.

Mycroft Holmes’s only weakness was his family. And of those, the biggest weakness was Will. He loved his parents, of course, but he positively doted on his baby brother. (There was, of course, the one who was never mentioned. Anthea didn’t know if Mycroft loved her, but she was definitely a weakness.)

Not that most people knew it.

It was only in the safety of his own office that Mycroft would even allow himself the weakness of a smile when Will texted him (and the fact that he would allow it in front of Anthea was a mark of utmost trust). Outside it, Mycroft cultivated the image of an exasperated but dutiful older sibling, not close and even less affectionate.

Well, he tried, at least.

* * *

Will Holmes was, in John Watson’s opinion, a good bloke.

The man was just genuinely nice - all the time!

He really couldn’t believe that Will was blood-related to Mycroft Holmes, the closest thing Molly had to a superior. Mycroft was a cold fish, with an unnervingly flat gaze and a posh, public-school snootiness that positively dripped off his every word and movement. Although his younger brother must have had the same education and the same upbringing, Will was much more approachable, just another one of the lads. (If one with a decidedly macabre sense of humor, and a tendency to be found wrist-deep in dead people.)

In fact, if anything, Will’s fault lay in the opposite direction. Will let both Molly and Mycroft run roughshod over him - sometimes both at once, to John’s secret dismay. Sometimes he felt so guilty, standing by as Molly blatantly manipulated Will into letting her have the run of the labs, or another foot, or - well, whatever she wanted. However, the one time he had raised a feeble objection, Molly had not even registered it, and the _look_ Will gave him - it had been the one and only time John ever thought Will the scarier of the two Holmes brothers.

* * *

James Moriarty wanted Molly Hooper. He wanted to taste her, to eat her up, to devour her, to destroy her. He called her the Virgin, mockingly to his underlings but with a dark-twisted Irish Catholic reverence for the name in his own head.

He wanted Mycroft Holmes as well, with an intent less sexual and more heated. His feelings towards the other man were tinted with the awe engendered by the man’s younger sister, Eurus - the only person in the world Moriarty acknowledged as a mental superior, just as she was the only one Mycroft did. He loved catching glimpses of Eurus in Mycroft, loved to catalog the ways in which Mycroft differed. The Iceman, he called Mycroft, admiring the other man’s intellect and cold ruthlessness. Also, he would have liked to freeze the Iceman, preserve him in crystal, to take out and gaze at and talk to whenever he wanted - to, in the end, shatter that smug, smirking face into a thousand bright shards and grind them underfoot.

He was bored and deeply disappointed with the youngest of the Holmes siblings. Will - even his name was so much more pedestrian than either of his brilliant, lovely siblings. Will was a milksop, a doormat for his betters to wipe their feet on. Will went out to pubs to pull women, a regular series of one-night stands while he pined ineffectually for Molly Hooper. Will had a pet dog named Toby. Will liked sailboats and ginger nuts and ugly sweaters (something he shared in common with John Watson).

Will made Jim want to vomit. He didn’t bother to give him a nickname.

* * *

Irene Adler had been told that Will Holmes was not worth wasting her time on - that while yes, he was a pressure point for Mycroft Holmes and possibly for Molly Hooper (Jim thought not), he was so boring and predictable that they could take him whenever needed and no further study was necessary.

Irene thought this was wrong.

Irene wasn’t a deductive/inductive genius, like the larger-than-life personalities she was currently playing with and against. She didn’t have Molly Hooper’s hawk-like focus and hunter’s instincts. She didn’t have Mycroft Holmes’s cool, all-encompassing comprehension, nor James Moriarty’s phenomenal cunning. She herself was, of course, cunning, intelligent and observant, but not to the frankly superhuman degrees those three were.

What she was, however, was good at reading humans. Intuition, not deduction, was her stock in trade.

And William Sherlock Scott Holmes made her intuition (and other parts) tingle.

* * *


End file.
